POST ANIMAL // Protecting the Whimsy: Adulthood Forged in IRON, Grief, Growing up + Glittering Absurdity
- syn devereaux
- Jul 25, 2025
- 9 min read
Post Animal’s ten-track feast is tender, feral, + full of sonic prayers for the parts of us that refuse to disappear
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Malcom is cooking.
I repeat: MALCOM IS COOKING. Who’s Malcom? What are they cooking? Is it spicy? Can I smell it from down the old gravel road? Not sure the answers on any of those questions, but you know who did cook? Post Animal. Yup. A ten course (track) meal (album) with their latest, IRON just released July 25, 2025– not a single skip. To that I say: YES CHEF.
By the end of my listen, I was full. Full of nostalgia. Angst. That weird feeling you get when you realize you’re really in your 30s. That you’re not a kid anymore, but you’re still figuring it out. Full of grief– anticipatory and not. I left from listening to the album full, yes. But also whole. It was like these songs were puzzle pieces kept in the dark with truths I didn’t know I needed to hear about myself. The dusty corners no longer so dusty. The tracks hurt. But hurt in a way that feels earned. Mine, but also theirs. Yours. All in a way that only music can do– reflecting on your inner mirrorball and hitting all the notes in all the right places because you’re not the only one in the reflection. Let's dig in.
If we’re keeping the “meal” imagery, our appetizer, Malcoms Cooking opens the album with a whispery guitar instrumental track. You can hear the crickets and the nature behind them. When Facetiming with Lauren around midnight to listen to it, I said to her, “I bet you it started with them around a fire. Shooting the shit.” As we near the end of July and hit that sweet apex of summer, this is the track I want at bonfires and catching fireflies in the Catskills or BFE Indiana. Wherever you find yourself. It’s soft, but strong strumming opening to a breezy finger picking. Picking up a drum beat and tambourine at 1:14 and ends with bottles clinking and someone talking about Diet Coke. It's human and lived in the way your favorite hoodie smells like campfire and cheap beer; cicadas and spoken memories hanging in the air and clinging to trees. A perfect balance before we get to Last Goodbye.
It’s incredible how much can change in three months. Three months since Last Goodbye was released and I wrote about how it felt like a love letter to my desert roots. How it reminded me of my family– my brother in particular– and how at the time we didn’t speak. There was peace and grief all rolled into one like a cloud of dust from a canteen fish dust devil (more on that later). In those three months however, something… happened. A chain of action, reaction– cause and effect. In June, I went on a particularly weird date at my local haunt, The Canary in Prospect Heights. It was one of those things that I definitely knew better, but had to do it anyway. Personal growth and all that. Yawn. Eye roll.
At BAM HQ, we firmly believe that music = memory. And oh my god is it. That night as I was nursing my corona, eyeing the door wondering if I was going to get stood up or not, trying not to cry (and failing) I was hit song after song. I had a meltdown over a song that was too poetic for words with the guy next to me (he finally showed) and then finally, before we left– my brother's ringtone played over the loud speakers. The bassline and chords slamming me (metaphorically) against a wall and had me by the throat. The next few days were ROUGH. In maybe a moment of weakness– human need– or what, I don’t know– the next day I called my brother. I got his voicemail. Left one. Voice shaking. On the verge of tears. Told him I missed him. I loved him. I hoped he was doing well. At that moment, I was just a girl who missed her brother. Deeply. Wholly. Last goodbyes and no contact be damned.
Cut to this past week, I’m laying in bed. Phone on do not disturb trying to take a nap. I checked my notifications and saw a missed call and voicemail. FROM MY BROTHER. Yes, that one. The only one I have (That I know of). Last goodbye… no more…? We eventually hopped on a call that would be two hours long. Nothing was fixed right away. Didn’t need to be. We talked about our lives and what we’ve missed in the last year and a half. I told him about band-aid and the community of music obsessed nerds I’m helping co-create. He didn’t say it, but I'd like to think he was proud. I know I am. Of him. Of me. Of the two kids who got the hell out of that desert town– whether it's 65 miles or 3,000– we did it, all with a million versions of last goodbyes to things we never thought we’d say. I’m thankful we’ve shifted from last goodbye to a second chance.
Must appreciate.
Promptly cries for the seventeenth time today and it's only 2pm.
Phew. Okay. Back on track. *Wipes tears and throws a millennial peace sign up for deflection to vulnerability. Don’t perceive me. Or do.
Speaking of voicemails.
The third item on the menu is serving. And I don't just mean in the colloquial sense of the gen-z term.
Maybe You Have To opens with a voicemail from Wes’ abuela Maria and holy shit. The track ends with another voicemail from her and it felt weirdly familiar like a voicemail from my own grandmother.
“Wesley, it's Abuela, Abuela Maria from Tampa/ I just call you because I am praying for you and I love you/ And I think of you everyday/ And I have you in my most wanted list of prayers/ In fact, you are number one/ I want you to be happy, to get a good job/ And most important/ I want you to love God with all of your heart/ Don't forget that”
Jesus. GIVE A GIRL SOME WARNING?! There’s only, I don’t know, an entire Chevy Tahoe in my eyes. While someone’s cutting onions. The prayers. The answers to God. Wanting a good job. To be a descendant of (what I am assuming is) a Catholic immigrant maternal figure. Full on shaking sobs in stereo over here. In another life my grandma would still leave these. She still tries through Facebook wall messages like love letters to war that go unanswered (bandaids don’t fix bullet holes or something like that). This song fills the hole of ache and grief from childhood trauma in a deeply unexpected way. Reminding me that those generational prayers are holy and maybe the glue that we all need in the stickiness of life. That maybe yeah, life is short and I can knock a few bricks down my own walls and peak over the other side. That I can do that and still be safe.
Listening to this with Lauren over Facetime, she can tell you I may have been a bit dramatic. Snotty cries and lying limply in a broken chair like an ailing Victorian child. I stand by it, okay?
I am dramatic. I am full of emotion. Of whimsy and woe and everything in between. “Protect the whimsy” she whispers. This track does just fucking that. Yeah, first F-bomb. I said it. Feeling things will do that to you! The grief and ache and awe of life and the cyclical nature of transformation through sonic residue and leaving it messy on purpose. It’s present and unapologetic in its raw and sacred humanness. They’re not polishing it up or running away from it. Leaving it messy on purpose, with purpose. It’s a love letter. A eulogy (Wes, I sincerely hope your Abuela is still around to hear this because YEAH. YOU DID IT, PAL! And if not, I just know she’s proud. Fuck, now I’m crying again.)
“Maybe you have to go/ Flash of light it's like that/ You know that life doesn't work like that/ Somebody goes, I can't bring them right back/ Another life, it doesn't work like that/ But maybe/ Right there on your own/ Imagine the way that you fill my soul/ It's all a gift, don't let it be forfеit/ Maybe you have to leavе a thing unsaid”
Again: GIVE A GIRL SOME WARNING, OKAY?! And don’t even get me started on the synths layered in it, okay. I hear you What’s A Good Life sonic easter eggs. The guitars?? The drums?? You served. You ate. You licked every finger clean. I’m going to violently sob again into a soup plate.
After a dish that left me teary and hollowed out in the best way with Maybe You Have To, Setting Sun arrives like a slow exhale. The fourth course. Still warm, but softer– more fleeting but heartier. The kind of plate that tastes like something your body already knows. Comfort food for the end of something.
The end of something? Yeah. I burst into tears when I heard the studio version. It immediately brought me back to Brooklyn Steel in May. Hearing it two nights, not in a row, but back to back nonetheless. Something about music is memory and all that. It’s a bittersweet ache that mirrors a personal unfolding that was happening in real time and now– now things are so different from those moments I stood in the crowd swaying and dancing watching Dalton sing. Hindsight is funny that way. It was foreshadowing a setting sun I never saw coming.
And sure, it hurts. But what happens when the sun sets? It rises again and again.
“Not scared of the dark side, just of letting it all pass by/ I'm sheddin' again, just look up and see/ Always movin', always changin', passin' by/ Like a setting sun/ Still burning, just around the other side/ It's a setting sun/ Always movin', always changin', passin' by/ Like a setting sun/ Still burnin'/ Still burnin'”
The intro with the drum fill and those guitars and the synths? I immediately saw myself in a ridiculous roller disco montage, full 70s get up with the Farrah Fawcett windswept hair and everything. The tube socks. Big hoops and cherry lipgloss. Headphones plugged into my walkman. Eyes closed. Lights twinkling and refracting in neon memories. Just me, a cassette tape and a roller rink. In this music born fantasy I can skate backwards and am a graceful gazelle gliding around and NOT a newborn baby deer learning to walk for the first time with knee pads and wrist braces. I’m old, okay. Being thirty two and a half has not been kind on my bones or joints.
Daydreaming with music and seeing myself in the odd and impossible is a coping skill I’ve had since I was a kid. Makes for a really interesting and overactive imagination. It offers a contrast to the actual visceral and rooted memory of the song I have. Both can exist. I’m really glad they do.
If Setting Sun was a hearty pre-main course, Pie In The Sky is the dessert coming to the table too soon but indulging anyway. The lightness after the heaviness and yearning of the last three tracks is a perfect palette cleanser and shift in mood. Instantly offering a little bit of ridiculousness as the apex of the album. She’s giddy. She’s saccharine.
We needed something sweet post dehydrated cry fest. Our blood sugar and Moony aren’t the only things on the rise. Since its release, this song has felt so personal and the perfect blend of silly and devotional reverent prayer. “Hit me with your shine” Guys– GUYS. It's charming, cheesy (hehe) and has bats in the cave. Ironically, the other day there was a bat where I was house sitting. I named it Betty at first. Then Dorien (Kregg) only to finally land on Ozzy. RIP Prince of Darkness.
Pie In The Sky is a not so quiet shove away from the table. It’s a throw the napkin down, unbutton your pants and do a little dance with your table mates. It’s the moment in the meal where you stop crying long enough to laugh at how hard you’ve been crying. Gasping for air in that weird liminal cry/laugh place. It's indulgent without being too much. After the first four tracks, it lands soft, yet firmly and is balanced. Earned.
There is service in absurdity and Post Animal doesn’t shy away from it. They’re dishing it at full sonic speed, leaning in with all gas and no breaks. It’s exactly the kind of song you want midway through an album. All levity and heart– these guys aren’t afraid to put the clown make up on and say, “The sun has set. We ride at dawn. LFG.”
In my most humble of opinions, the world needs more of this. For that, I say, thank fucking god.
B Side coming soon!
FOLLOW SYN
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